The terms passive investing and index investing are often intertwined, but they are not exactly the same thing. Today's guest is Adriana Robertson, the Honourable Justice Frank Iacobucci Chair in Capital Markets Regulation and an associate professor of Law and Finance at the University of Toronto Faculty of Law and Rotman School of Management. Adriana is interested in index investing and, in this episode, we hear her views on whether or not index investing is passive. Hear facts from her paper o...
Jan 21, 2021•48 min•Season 2Ep. 133
With so many moving parts, it's difficult to develop a clear view of the US monetary system. Today we speak with Pragmatic Capitalism author and Founder of Orcam Financial Group Cullen Roche, leveraging his expertise to build a comprehensive understanding of the monetary system. We open our interview with Cullen by asking him the deceptively simple question, "what is money?" We then explore where money comes from, the role of the central bank in securing our money supply, and why poor capitaliza...
Jan 14, 2021•1 hr 12 min•Season 2Ep. 132
At its core, managing wealth is about finding the best solutions for your clients. As he mentions in today's discussion with him, this sentiment has guided David Booth's storied career. As the Co-Founder and Executive Chairman of Dimensional Fund Advisors, David's career is so illustrious that he's been called the father of evidence-based investment products. We open our conversation by exploring David's career, beginning with his job as a shoe salesman in Kansas to developing the first index fu...
Jan 07, 2021•1 hr 9 min•Season 2Ep. 131
For this episode of the Rational Reminder Podcast, we review our year by playing back and discussing a collection of the most impactful moments of the show from 2020. This has been a drastic year filled with many learnings for us all, and in today's show, we cover topics of happiness, decision making, dealing with uncertainty, and the connection that financial planning and investing have to all of this. We collect some amazing gems of wisdom from guests like Annie Duke, Ken French, Michael Kitce...
Dec 24, 2020•1 hr 35 min•Season 2Ep. 130
After months of research, number-crunching, and receiving listener requests on the subject, today's episode is devoted to introducing our new model ETF portfolios — which promise to offer a smoother ride to getting reliable returns. We open our conversation with a financial news roundup and by touching on our book of the week. We then dive into the theory behind our model by first exploring how market assets are priced. We discuss historical views on asset pricing models before looking at what a...
Dec 17, 2020•1 hr 9 min•Season 2Ep. 129
As author and financial expert Morgan Housel explains this episode, "people don't make financial decisions on a spreadsheet. They make financial decisions at the dinner table." Today we chat to Morgan about his key insights into financial decision-making — many of which are captured in his book, The Psychology of Money . Our conversation opens with an exploration of how investing success has less to do with what you know and more to do with how you manage your behaviour. We then look into the da...
Dec 10, 2020•52 min•Season 2Ep. 128
There is a sharp divide between those who invest in dividend-paying stocks and those who don't. Underpinning this is the question of whether dividends are relevant to the evaluation of shares. Today we answer this question by digging into the data and parsing the maths before exploring what the future of financial planning looks like. But first, we open our episode with news from the Rational Reminder community — including the fact that we just passed one million podcast downloads. We then touch...
Dec 03, 2020•54 min•Season 2Ep. 127
Dr. Brian Portnoy and Josh Brown's book How I Invest My Money , captures the stories and investment strategies of 25 top financial advisors. The book highlights that while there are established dogmas that tell you how and why you ought to invest, there is no 'one-size-fits-all' way to invest. Today we speak with Brian and Josh about the key insights that we can derive from their work. We open our conversation by exploring how they conceived and developed their book before talking about why full...
Nov 26, 2020•57 min•Season 2Ep. 126
On today's show, we explore rational explanations for pricing bubbles, how the concept of human capital relates to financial decisions, and a whole lot more! We kick things off with a discussion of Ashley Whillans' book Time Smart, which explores proven strategies for improving your 'time affluence'. Diving into this week's portfolio topic, we use a previous discussion about Carlota Perez's model for technological revolutions as a springboard to introduce Lubos Pastor and Pietro Veronesi's mathe...
Nov 19, 2020•1 hr 10 min•Season 2Ep. 125
Professor Lubos Pastor's brilliant and varied research has been consistently referenced on this podcast. From how politics impacts stock returns to measuring the skill of active fund managers, Lubos joins us today as we explore some of the 'greatest hits' of his research. With Lubos's position on the board of the Slovakian Central bank, we ask him about how quantitative easing can be used to strengthen the economy. His answers highlight how easing can prop up asset prices and raise inflation — a...
Nov 12, 2020•1 hr 7 min•Season 2Ep. 124
As counter-intuitive as it may seem, most of the companies that push us into the next technological revolution deliver poor investment returns. Today we look at current and historical data to show why this is the case but first, we chat about the top financial news of the week. Borrowing heavily from Carlota Perez's Technological Revolutions and Financial Capital , we then explore how the links between tech revolutions and investing adhere to a consistent model. Following this model, we discuss ...
Nov 05, 2020•1 hr 19 min•Season 2Ep. 123
There are seven equations that, if understood, will put you in the best possible position to tackle your retirement plan. Today we speak with business professor Moshe Milevsky about these equations, which he's written extensively about in his best-selling book, The 7 Most Important Equations for Your Retirement . After introducing Moshe, we dive straight into the first equation that maps out the longevity of your money. Following this, we talk about determining how long you will live by comparin...
Oct 29, 2020•54 min•Season 2Ep. 122
Despite the mountain of evidence against it, day trading is thriving. Today we dive into the research and explore why the practice is alive and well before answering the question — "Can too much confidence lose you money?" After touching on investing news, listener feedback, our books of the week, and our take on the 'Ultimate Ned Debate,' we open our discussion on day trading. In our conversation, we look at the results of numerous papers on the topic, none of which present-day trading as sound...
Oct 22, 2020•1 hr 5 min•Season 2Ep. 121
Good decision-making is a fundamental part of achieving our goals, so getting better at it would be in anybody's best interest. Here to talk about making better decisions is Annie Duke, expert poker player and author of How to Decide: Simple Tools for Making Better Decisions, and Thinking in Bets. Annie starts by defining what a good decision should look like and some of the steps involved. From there, we explore the idea of how to accommodate the fact that our preferences change and we sometime...
Oct 15, 2020•54 min•Season 2Ep. 120
Thank you for tuning in to this episode of the Rational Reminder. We start this show with some great news about the comment section and our migration to Discourse. Having an open dialogue has always been crucial for us—it has even led to our latest hire—so we felt it was time to add more structure to it. We then talk about mortgage rates and why so many people do not know that it is possible to negotiate them down even further. There is often a big gap between what is publicly advertised and wha...
Oct 08, 2020•1 hr 12 min•Season 2Ep. 119
What are the psychological conditions that allow investors to make rational decisions, and how do these processes of decision-making occur? These are the questions that our guest, Victor Ricciardi, is dedicated to answering and what he is here on the show today to talk about! Victor is the Visiting Assistant Professor of Finance at Washington and Lee University as well as the Coordinator of Behavioral and Experimental Research at the Social Science Research Network. He has an MBA in finance and ...
Oct 01, 2020•44 min•Season 2Ep. 118
For the first part of today's discussion, we are joined by Don Coletti from The Central Bank of Canada. He is here to talk about their upcoming recommendation for a monetary policy framework for the next five years which is incorporating public feedback into its development through the survey, Lets Talk Inflation. From there, we touch on some favourite books, Starbucks's stored value card liabilities, the benefits of keeping inheritance in a separate account, new standards for financial planners...
Sep 24, 2020•1 hr 21 min•Season 2Ep. 117
Joining us on the Rational Reminder today is one of the pioneers in the space of evidence-based investing, and someone who has been a massive inspiration to us, Mark Hebner! His website, Index Fund Advisors, was one of the first to start explaining the ideas of an evidence-based approach and the power of indexing, way back in the 1990s. We get to hear from Mark about his transition from misled active investor to his discovery of indexing and how this led to him founding Index Fund Advisors. One ...
Sep 17, 2020•58 min•Season 2Ep. 116
Our focus for this episode of the Rational Reminder is split into two sections; first, we cycle through our regular features, looking at a number of studies and articles of interest, the market during the pandemic, and our bad advice segment, and then Benjamin is joined by Tim Nash to talk about ethical investing and comment on Wealthsimple's new sustainable portfolio. We start off our weekly round-up talking about the idea of broadening a knowledge-base and how reading widely and diversely on a...
Sep 10, 2020•1 hr 22 min•Season 2Ep. 115
When it comes to your financial life, you can have endless conversations about asset allocation but we often neglect the impact of communication and asking difficult questions. Today we speak with Chief Financial Commentator and awarded media personality, Pattie Lovett-Reid. We start the discussion by COVID silver-linings and the financial lessons that people have been learning due to the pandemic. Pattie explores how people's views of risk have shifted, along with the realization that our portf...
Sep 03, 2020•45 min•Season 2Ep. 114
The hype to invest in high-cap tech companies is deafening. In this episode, we share what you need to know before buying FANG company stocks. Although FANG is the popular term, our analysis includes Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Alphabet, Tesla, and Microsoft — so it's closer to the less slick-sounding FAAATM. Before we dive into that, we talk about the show's books of the week and how ETFs and mutual funds have been performing compared to July of 2019. We then set the scene for how FANG businesses ...
Aug 27, 2020•58 min•Season 2Ep. 113
Michael Kitces is one of the world's leading experts in financial services but is also a trusted authority in retirement planning research, and today he joins us for a brilliant conversation that covers both topics. Michael is the Head of Planning Strategy at Buckingham Wealth Partners, Co-Founder of XY Planning Network, AdvicePay, and fpPathfinder, and also hosts the much-admired Financial Advisor Success podcast. In the first section of the show, we shoot our questions about retirement plannin...
Aug 20, 2020•1 hr 16 min•Season 2Ep. 112
With the gold price reaching record highs, we revisit the contentious issue of whether you should add gold to your portfolio. Before mining that topic, we talk about Super Pumped: The Battle for Uber and Am I Being Too Subtle? — our book recommendations of the week. We then touch on key news stories including how the recent Apple stock split has affected its position in the Dow index. After fielding a listener question about why central banks care about deflation, we share the reasons for and ag...
Aug 13, 2020•1 hr 9 min•Season 2Ep. 111
Often called a 'once in one hundred years event', the COVID-19 pandemic is having a profound impact on the economy. Today's guest is Craig Alexander, Deloitte's Chief Economist, who brings his 29 years of experience analyzing the economy to answer our questions about the marketplace. We start the conversation by exploring how the pandemic is affecting small businesses, with Craig adding insights into what the government should be doing to help. Craig discusses how the pandemic has revealed inade...
Aug 06, 2020•1 hr 7 min•Season 2Ep. 110
Quantitative easing is a monetary policy whereby a central bank buys government bonds or other financial assets in order to inject money into the economy to expand economic activity. But what exactly does that mean? In today's episode, Benjamin and Cameron are going to address this topic, avoiding highly politicized aspects, like whether or not central banks should be involved in the economy in the first place, and focusing purely on the operational perspective of quantitative easing – what is i...
Jul 30, 2020•1 hr 3 min•Season 2Ep. 109
In keeping with our recent tide of incredible guests, today's one is no exception. Dr. William Bernstein, a financial theorist, advisor, and neurologist, joins us to share some of his incredible insights. As the author of several seminal books such as The Intelligent Asset Allocator and The Four Pillars of Investing , Dr. Bernstein has made his mark applying his medical evidence-based approach to investing. These works have had a particularly strong influence on Cameron when he made the transiti...
Jul 23, 2020•44 min•Season 2Ep. 108
As the expression goes, another day, another dollar. Today's episode is a roundup of news and analysis with deeper dives into behavioural and risk-based market explanations, active management, and endowment investing models. We open with a book review of Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less by Greg McKeown, a book that's getting a lot of attention at the moment. Another topic that's getting a lot of attention, we discuss how Tesla's huge market cap growth makes it feel like it's 1999. W...
Jul 16, 2020•1 hr 10 min•Season 2Ep. 107
Today's guest is Dr. Jim Stanford, Economist and Director of the Centre for Future Work and author of Economics for Everyone . We kick things off with Jim hearing his perspectives on what makes this recession unprecedented before he argues that a traditional approach to macroeconomic policy won't be enough to augment more than a crippled and unstable recovery. This situation might hold a silver lining though and Jim sketches out the opportunity it provides for rethinking employment ethics. After...
Jul 09, 2020•57 min•Season 2Ep. 106
With private equity investments increasing in popularity, you may feel the pressure to expand your portfolio. Today's episode, we look at the data behind private equity returns to see if these investments add something to your portfolio that you couldn't get elsewhere. But first, we discuss some big news — that slow-moving Dimensional Fund Advisors are entering the ETF marketplace. After looking at the implications of this move, we use a Harvard paper as our springboard into the topic of private...
Jul 02, 2020•1 hr 10 min•Season 2Ep. 105
Today, we get into a masterclass on retirement planning with a true expert in the field whose perspectives are distinctly evidence-based, Fred Vettese. Fred is a Partner and former Actuary at Morneau Shepell and author of three retirement books including Retirement Income For Life. We hear Fred's thoughts on what people should be spending in retirement, why there is not a retirement crisis in Canada, and how Canadians can live on far less than they have been told. Fred talks about how to prepare...
Jun 25, 2020•1 hr 1 min•Season 2Ep. 104
